Our Story

We first came up with the idea for Nix™ while working with a few interior design friends. They thought that lugging around tote bags filled with paint decks was an unnecessary hassle in the 21st century! We didn’t think it made any sense that you should have to pay hundreds of dollars for a big bulky paint deck system that only worked with one company’s paints.

To make the situation worse, this expensive “solution” was still greatly affected by ambient lighting conditions and human error. We discussed the idea of a product that could solve all of these problems. Everyone we spoke to in the industry thought it was a great idea.

Early drawings and renders of our first prototype.

Another colleague of ours was doing incredible work at a local hospital with burn victims and patients with other severe skin disorders. Her business was to consult with patients and create custom makeup that perfectly blended with the patients’ natural skin tones.

Interestingly enough, at that moment she was actually looking for an accurate and inexpensive color sensor to remove the costly manual color matching routine from the procedure. It would revolutionize her business model while allowing her to help patients from all over the world. We thought this was a noble idea and it inspired us to start full time research and development on the product. There was just one problem: as recent engineering grads we didn’t have the necessary funds to do the project justice.

We decided to apply for a R&D grant to help get the ball rolling. It was a gruelling process as every last detail of our business plan had to be scrutinized by government analysts. After two months of revisions we finally secured the funds! It was a ton of work, but looking back it was worth it just to come out with such a rock solid business plan. The grant allowed us to hire our first employee and begin working on the science of color measurement.

Some of the iterations and prototypes.

Six months after our initial funding, hundreds of Red Bulls, too many man tears, and countless prototypes later, the final Nix prototype was born. After an ultra-successful Kickstarter campaign that helped us fund the production of the first commercial prototype of Nix, we have shipped Nix Pro units to professionals, tech nerds, and designers in over 37 countries world-wide.